It’s politics stupid: What Museveni needs for security cameras to work

After the recent shock assassination of Assistant Inspector General of Police and Force spokesman Andrew Felix Kaweesi, President Museveni ordered the installation of security cameras around the country.

Some people have said, “This is Uganda, it won’t happen. The money will be eaten”. Others have said it is simply too expensive, and Finance minister Matia Kasaija has already seemed to pour water on it.

A columnist in Daily Monitor noted that even offices that have security cameras, have not been able to prevent crime.
He has a point. Though there are troubling elements to it, the ideal world would be like that in the film “Minority Report”, starring Tom Cruise.

In it there is a precrime unit, which utilises clever technology to arrest murderers before they commit their crime.
But even in the fantasy world of film, “Minority Report” is based on America in 2054. In other words, we are still 37 years away from that.

Reducing crime and catching criminals are good goals, so let us make the overly optimistic assumption that the cameras money can be found, and this time it won’t be stolen. How then can we have something that works.

To which our answer is that for security cameras to work, the second thing you need is police sector reform. The first is political reform. Only after that, should you bother to buy and install cameras.

In many of these African countries, those security cameras put out there by governments might work, but they are useless.
Here is why, and we promise we will only use technical jargon in the following two sentences.

The cameras Museveni is talking about are referred to as “Internet protocol” (IP) cams or “network cameras”. They send and receive data (in this case photographs) over a local area network (LAN) or the Internet.

Because we all have mobile phones with cameras these days, we know that most times we have to make photographs smaller (compress), in order to send them to friends. One reason for that is because we have only a limited amount of bandwidth.

Also, after a while, we have to delete photographs from our phones, because we have only so much memory on both the phone and memory cards.

Security cameras work in the same way. They take photographs, and send them over a network to where they are stored almost like on our cameras and mobile phones.

If you had 100 friends and each of them was taking photos and sending them to your phone, in minutes you would have no space and wouldn’t be able to receive anything either – unless you could get a phone as big as your refrigerator and miraculously shift to a future 6G network.

Therefore, imagine for a second, the cameras at the Clock Tower Roundabout, Jinja Road, and the Shimoni Roundabout at peak hour. Every minute they could take and send more photos than any network in Kampala can carry.

After six hours, they would probably fill any digital storage this country has. Imagine all the cameras around Kampala, and all the towns and highways sending images to one central storage in Kampala at the same time.

Even if you took all the bandwidth in Uganda and dedicated it only to that, I doubt it would still be enough. And you will need Google-level storage to keep the data.

So the figures of under $200m being bandied around are useless. If we spent $2 billion (and most of it on bandwidth and storage), not cameras as such, we might get somewhere.

But that is impossible. The next alternative is to break it down in small pieces. Here different zones of Kampala, every town, and district would have their cameras, networks and data centres.

The national system then comes from networking all these small pieces. If you want information, you go in and query their databases. Even most of those Western countries that are very advanced in these things, like the UK, that is what they do.

But these countries also have strong local and city policy forces, some funded locally, and their leaderships appointed – or elected – at town, city, and state levels.

In Uganda, there is no police leader anywhere in this country who is not appointed either by President Museveni or IGP Kale Kayihura from Kampala.

If we deconcentrate, decentralise, and democratise the police, we shall have a force that is local-facing, and sufficiently accountable at that level to effectively execute things like security cameras. We shouldn’t build a system where everything in Uganda comes to Kayihura’s server room.

His job will be to pick the phone, when a vile crime happens, and ask for footage. That’s a cheaper system and doable.

But, as we said, it is a political question.

Onyango-Obbo is the publisher of Africa data visualiser Africapedia.com and explainer site Roguechiefs.com. Twitter@cobbo3